the tragedy of
the commons

The tragedy
of the commons is part of a series of briefing
documents on housing and making living systems ecological.
This grouping is contained within a set of documents on
global concerns at abelard.org.

This technical term comes from days gone past when all
villagers held a piece of land in ‘common’,
each villager was able to put as many animals to graze
upon it as they wished. For any individual, the situation
was clear:

“If I put one more animal on the common, I would
improve my lot”.

Trouble arose when every villager acted upon that calculation,
with the end result that the common became over-grazed,
the animals were weak through malnourishment and the common
land became threadbare.
The situation remained however for any individual: another
animal was a bonus.

Thus individual advantage was
inevitably accompanied by village poverty.

It has long been known that the average person can handle friendships
with up to about twelve people and acquaintanceships with up to two hundred
people. I would speculate that these numbers approximate evolutionary
experience with kin and with tribe. Hardin [1] , who
made the Tragedy of the Commons a life study, came to the conclusion that
in order to stop related problems, there were three main requirements:

ownership of resources;

ability to back up decisions by sufficient sanctions;

a number of responsible people, not exceeding 150;

These limitations on human social capacity are pervasive. For example,
recently there have been attempts to link such reasoning to the
analysis of terror cells.

Even in Hutterite communities, with above that number of members the
freeloading problem is too great. For freeloading, read cheating, and
cheating cannot be stopped unless the sanctions on the cheats are sufficiently
heavy.

span and time in
the tragedy of the commons

It is not possible to stop tragedy of the commons problems
without attending to both space and time.
This I shall develop in the context of some examples.

Fisheries are commons that are not owned in many cases and fish can
also be inclined to wander.

Oil reserves are being treated in a similar manner, with the added
problem that there is no serious possibility of regeneration.

Pollution spreads around the world, recognising no artificial barriers
such as nation, or even ocean.

Likewise, jihadi moonbats who kill and destroy without reference to
a national base.

When the use of a commons, such as fisheries or oil reserves, extends
beyond the users’ lifetimes, people with access often have little
or no concern because the problems will not arrive in their
lifetime. Thus they are content to ruin the commons because they do not
have to pay for the result.

Oil and fisheries are two example commons in this situation. Their exploiters
care little that future users will find the cupboard bare. At least the
current users are able to become as rich as they can manage while stocks
last.

It has to be decided what particular reality comprises a commons.

cap
and trade - pollution credits

Pollution credits are better called cap and trade. It is a market solution
to a tragedy of the commons problem.

The government puts a cap on a country’s emissions. (Eventually,
this goes international on the basis of ‘negotiation’.)

Within a country or treaty block, large polluters, at the very least,
are granted part of that allocation.

The right-to-pollute allocations are traded in a market.

As a critical part of the process, the original cap is steadily reduced.

What does this achieve? It means that those who can most easily (that
is, most ‘cheaply’) reduce the filth they produce, will
reduce their filth and then sell their rights to others who find it
more difficult or expensive.

Thus, producers of clean energy can sell allowances to polluters, or
buy allocations and sell on at a profit. That gives incentives to produce
clean energy.

There will be at least some corruption, because governments are involved.
Thus, large party contributors will lobby for larger allocations. This
amounts to a large subsidy to the companies who are allocated the original
pollution rights, which now become saleable in the market. Some countries
will get more rights than is sane, and others will then play the system,
pretending to agree but trying to ignore the allocated levels.

The system depends on strong cap levels and rigorous enforcement.

The end objective is to reduce the filth in the most efficient and least
costly manner.

A major problem with the tragedy of the commons situation is
that nobody owns the assets. When nobody owns assets, people tend to despoil
those assets. (This is a major problem with socialism,
and why there was such great pollution and inefficiency in the Russian
socialist empire).

When burning
fossil fuels, the asset is the air or, more precisely,
that right to pollute the air. When nobody owns that right,
everybody uses it as a rubbish dump. This is little different
than a person who fly-tips their rubbish by the side of
the road, or who dumps litter, rather than paying for
the petrol to take their rubbish to the local dump or
to expend the effort of carrying the litter to the nearest
rubbish bin. This process is known as externalising
costs. The process of saving your costs by dumping
them on other people, such as leaving a road sweeper to
clear up your litter can also be seen as a form of theft.

Cap and trade is an example of bringing the problem
into an ownership situation, allocating ownership of those rights and
making a market for trading those rights. With cap and trade,
individuals own the right to pollute. Air is no longer a rubbish
dump that anyone can use at will. [See also span
and time in the tragedy of the commons.]

The whole planet, especially the Western world, is extremely dependent
on fossil fuels.

The nature of evolution is that species tend to fill available space.
That filling process is energy dependent for humans. For example, when
people in Northern Europe learnt a few things about agriculture, in
about 1000 A.D., they were able to introduce far more effective crop
raising. This led to rapidly increasing populations. The fossil fuel age
has had (and is having) similar effects.

If the fossil fuels were just stopped immediately. Billions would die
- billions, not hundreds or even millions.

Therefore, the process of moving away from filthy fossil fuels will have
to be managed, always assuming that humans are capable of doing this.

Meanwhile, fossil fuels, especially oil, means power, including military
power. Five-sixths of the world still lives at dire levels of productivity,
that is in poverty.

That five-sixths want what the other sixth has. This is a great deal
of why the Middle East is troublesome. They are trying to trade oil for
weapons, Western weapons, Western developed weapons, Western produced
weapons. Hence the great costs we are presently enduring, acting to civilise
the Middle East.

There is a saying: the stone age didn’t end because we ran out
of stones.

We are now in the oil age. If we have the slightest sense, we must manage
our way out of the oil age as quickly and efficiently as we can without
killing billions. That is not easy. If we stop using (very cheap) oil,
others will use it and continue the filth problems. So we have to offer
better alternatives, and gain cooperation. That is hard political, and
scientific, work. It is the reason for systems like cap and trade.

legislating
for a global commons—poverty, carbon and fossil fuel rationing

The notion of ownership is central to solving the problem of the tragedy
of the commons. No-one owns the globe. Therefore, international
commons problems fester until they cause resource wars, or environmental
degradation. These problems can be termed as market failures.

What a person owns, they can trade. Consequently, allocating fossil fuel
rations makes little sense if the owners of the rations may not trade their
allocation.

Only through giving each person, or interest, a tradable
ration can the various objectives of conservation, market efficiency with
its freedom enhancement, and alleviation of poverty be achieved, without
giving governments dangerous and untoward powers.

Thus fisheries are slowly moving to allocating limited catches among stakeholders,
at levels where the fish can replace themselves. [2]

Only by assigning property rights to fossil fuels and carbon, on an international
foundation, can the pollution and pressure on fossil fuels be resolved. Likewise,
fisheries and other goods will be destroyed without appropriate spans of ownership,
which include consideration of spawning grounds and migration routes.

This does not, and should not, encourage ambitions of world governments,
but where planetary (or other large cross-border) commons problems exist,
only international administrations can cope.

Freeloaders and Iraq

You will notice that the jihadi cult also has similar logic to a tragedy
of the commons, in that the jihadis cause destruction more or
less at random, whereas no country (the usual source
of of law and public peace) takes responsibility.

When the USA and other concerned states do take responsibility, the caterwauling
is orchestrated by those who can benefit from the activities of such cults.
Perhaps those with old-power dreams of empire may try setting sides against
one another for perceived advantage.

Allowing some primitive loon to use oil revenues to obtain powerful weapons,
with which to take control of the resources developed by Western nations,
is not acceptable if you desire a better and more advanced society.

Other such banding together to solve what are essentially tragedy of the
commons problems may be thought to be campaigns against Barbary pirates, for
the abolition of slavery, establishing ‘rules’ for just war, police
and criminality problems, and even a social commons designed to stop the casting
of litter.

some
history and micro-issues

State and private property are not the only ways of conserving
common goods.

Hernando
de Soto identifies lack of legal title in informal
economies as a major reason for poverty in countries where
capitalism exists without strong formal ‘laws’.
The greatest problem with joining the formal legal system
is predatory government, which attempts to steal ever
more of the GDP. (Incidentally, these governments also
force ever more of the country’s economy into a
monetarised form which they can then control and tax).

Meanwhile, corporations attempt to buy governments and
pressure them to introduce ‘laws’ (such as
ridiculous recent extensions of copyright) which restrict
competition, in order that the corporations may establish
near monopolies and thus keep out rivals.

Fisheries that are only managed for the interests of
current users are likely to be mined, in the manner of
other reserves, by selfish/foolish people seeking only
to maximise current profit.

“ There are two contending methods of dividing
the carbon cake. The first proposes a "carbon aristocracy"
of inherited natural resource wealth, in which the basis
for talks is the greenhouse gas emissions, per person,
that each country has today. The second, and a starting
position for countries such as China, India and Brazil,
is that the atmosphere is a global commons that we all
need. So entitlements to emit, they argue, should be
shared on a per capita basis.”

This
is the oft-cited article by Hardin, written 35 years ago.
It is interesting to see his prognostications for the
uncontrollability of populations, and his darkly hinted,
draconian ‘solutions’ (similar to those currently
in effect in China). Yet 35 years on, Western populations
are often on the wane. Hardin’s logic that those
who restrict their fecundity are likely in due course
to be out bred by those who don’t, and his secondary
assumption that this will lead straight back into the
original Malthusian dilemma, has yet to be empirically
verified.

Ostrom
has a modified version of Hardin’s rather fascistic
view, thinking that people and communuities run their
lives more by agreement.

‘In the end, building from the lessons of past
successes will require forms of communication, information
and trust that are broad and deep beyond precedent,
but not beyond possibility’. [Ostrom, E., Burger,
J., Field, C., Norgaard, R. and Policansky, D. (2003)
'Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges',
Science, 9 April.]

Western governments have constructed their welfare states in a manner
allowing breeding and then freeloading on the state (i.e. other tax payers);
this does seem to be the height of short-sighted foolishness. But this
style of allocating and distributing benefits must hit the buffers eventually.

The Ostrom article cited above gives examples of local communities that
have successfully managed limited resources over centuries. An alternative
outcome is shown in an incredible and terrible catalogue of human depredation
down the ages, to be found in A
green history of the world by C. Ponting.

It is always important to look at successes, if one wishes to move forward.
There is a ridiculous tendency in social sciences to concentrate on problems
and to ignore successful examples. It is by learning from success that
we move forward far more than the interminable cataloguing of failure.

The solutions catalogued by Ostrom are useful indicators of just why
‘democratic’ approaches are often much more effective in solving
TOTC issues. Democracy is not just some desirable fluff, it also has practical
advantages in saving us from some of the more difficult problems that
we face. However, keep in mind that Ostrom’s examples are in limited
geographical areas with few people involved, whereas Ponting’s examples
are often large widespread systems.

The growing understanding of game theory, as indicated in the section
on ‘your reputation’, also shows
some of the ways humans come to co-operate. Group co-operation also improves
individual survival. Those who imagine that nature is just some simplistic
dog-eat-dog competition have a highly simplistic understanding of evolution.
Those belonging to groups that co-operate are more likely to survive and
leave descendants than those who merely attempt to go it alone. Competing
groups tend to be a force selecting for co-operation, even though selection
within groups selects for competition.

Humans are not simply trapped in some Hobbesian prisoner’s
dilemma. The more complex reality gives much greater hope. It is also
well to remember that over-pessimism can lead to resignation and inaction.
Both pessimism and optimism can become self-fulfilling mind sets, this
in its turn causes difficulties if the optimism extends into the other
extremism of complacency.

your
reputation—watching the behaviour of others
“Theoretical models suggest that altruism can survive in populations
where individuals trust those they have seen co-operate with others, but
give nothing to those they have seen behave selfishly.”
[Nature, 19.09.02]